ABSTRACT
Realism, idealism, and dualism are three worldviews from which psychologists may choose to guide their thinking and to constrain and even shape arguments, experiments, and theories. In the history of psychology one school staunchly opposed idealism and dualism by making their best case for a direct realism, that is, one without representations or mediators so intimate contact with the world is assured. James Gibson recognized the difficulty others might have accepting the fact that the same energy distribution, like a television signal, might convey simultaneously multiple forms of information. Gibson's main interest was perception, but perception broadly construed—so broadly construed, in fact, as to leave room for incorporating cognition, memory, and motor behavior along with it under ecological psychology. One critical realist even went so far as to rename indirect realism "Personal Realism" to emphasize the need for both a subject and an object that bound the knowing relation.
